21 August

Germaine Greer has more or less retired now from public life it seems, living out her years with her brother’s family in Melbourne. She will always be one of the greatest minds of our time, for me. Always resolutely unpopular, which is one of the only true marks of genius. The truth is never popular. She’s not a contrararian, contrarians are just the opposing teams to current trending ideas. Genius is mostly simply indecipherable. People have no idea what a genius is talking about, because like Galileo they’re saying things that sit outside human team sports, human status games. It doesn’t even register in any of their frameworks of understanding the world, which are all defined by the same status games, not by any objective reality. If like me and you’re in your 50s or older, and you’re still navigating life based on what’s popular, what will allow you to ‘fit in’ with your friends, in my view your own development has stalled. If you’re not smashing the cages of the status quo with your experience and power at that time of life, if life is just endless ‘fun’ things to do, what the hell are you doing? Humanity needs you to use your position, to be the grown up in the room. *That’s* the only fun. Not aping adolescent life, with nothing but gigs and recreational travel and dining out, or ‘protesting’ or ‘standing with’ causes - what I call the permanent gap year from reality, after the adolescent gap year that now often follows high school. As a culture that year now never ends. Reading Greer is to experience a mind as free from the shackles of performative human status games as you’re likely to find. It’s glorious. Always blisteringly funny, as all geniuses are.